4 Reasons to Move Your Quality Management System to the Cloud

An increasing number of companies are choosing to deploy their Quality Management Systems (QMS)  in the cloud rather than on their own servers. It’s cost effective, secure, flexible and scalable.

Organizations like Spotify and Netflix have recently turned to the cloud as well. Hosting in the cloud means that organizations no longer need to deal with the pain of managing their own system. Cloud computing is a method of delivering solutions to the market in real-time over the Internet. It has a massive array of computing power—servers and storage—that host virtual environments.

The cloud has actually been around for longer than most would think, with origins dating back to the 1950s. Over time, it has become more prevalent.

Here are a few reasons more organizations are making the move to the cloud:

1. It’s cost effective: Cloud computing is like any subscription service. It’s a pay as you go concept. If you are low on IT resources, or just want to streamline your resources, then cloud computing can make the most sense for you. Hosting in the cloud reduces the overhead of server maintenance, upkeep and other functions so you don’t have to worry about them.  

2. It’s secure: Your cloud-based QMS should be certified to US/EU SafeHarbor, ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 as well as SOC 1 Type II and TRUSTe. The right cloud-based QMS will ensure no breaches or security risks by putting controls in place such as redundancies and backups, encryptions, firewalls and uptime, ensuring your organization’s information is kept private and secure.

3. It’s flexible: QMSs thrive on flexibility. Processes can change, grow and increase over time. You want to ensure that your system is flexible enough to manage the changing levels of load onto the system over time. With the cloud, companies are not confined to an in-house server with limited capabilities—and you’ll never have to worry about the system overloading.

4. It’s scalable: Scalability is huge benefit of the cloud. It means you can expand as much as you need too. Whether it’s 1, 2 or 250 sites that will be using the system. There is no concern of hardware limitation or bandwidth requirements because the system expands as much as necessary to accommodate your data.

Moving to the cloud means you have more time to focus on managing your quality and compliance initiatives rather than managing the complexities of the infrastructure.  The takeaway here is that the cloud makes things easier. It’s not because it’s “trendy” but because it’s the real deal. The benefit is that you are making the investment into a solution, but not into the costs associated with maintaining the solution. You are handing those off onto your cloud provider.

Spotify recently said, “like good, lazy engineers, we occasionally asked ourselves: do we really need to do all this stuff?” And to answer that question—no. The cloud is a simplified solution that allows a business to remain competitive, while taking care of the technicalities that keep the organization up and running.